Sony explained their decision on the Playstation 2 developer forum, in a post that has since been removed:

"The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes--this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3."

And this is understable, seeing how much PS3 price has come down from its launch.

Old PS3 owners still have the option, it just affects the 'slim' model.

Old PS3 owners still have the option, it just affects the 'slim' model.

For how many more months will the Old PS3 remain available with a hardware warranty? I have a feeling Sony will discontinue the Old PS3 by the fall shopping season, just as it quickly discontinued the original PS2 in favor of the slim PS2.

The Slim PS3 might be more hackable without the hypervisor being around. Odds are greater that one could better unlock the power of the PS3 since there's no hypervisor restricting access to the hardware directly.

The guy that owned the xbox and compromised the xbox360 security, claimed the only reason that the ps3 was safe from pirates was because they let you run all your otherOS/homebrew stuff, it will be interesting to see if this happens or if1) homebrew are happy using the older consoles2) homebrew try but fail to cack it3) pirates crack the new (weaker) ps3 without homebrew's help

Why not 4) homebrew and pirates work together semi-implicitly to crack the new (weaker) PS3 as happened with the Wii?

The Wii's "pirate" and "homebrew" crowds are not that different. Yes, there are the standouts (like marcan, whose definition of "piracy" often puts him at odds even with other people normally considered homebrewers, such as people who enjoy rewriting/redrawing banners for the hell of it and eventually led to the modern "bannerbomb"

I don't know much beyond what ive read of the xbox scene, but homebrewers are the kind of people that are going to put timer chips on motherboards, patch kernels, code simple games, exploit and generally do clever things, pirates just trick a console into thinking that it is playing a legit game. (again AFAIK) The xbox360 has pretty bulletproof, however 1 hole was found (by homebrew, to run linux on it) as a result the encryption keys for the cd drives where swiped and now pirates have produced modchips for

Do you think? They reduced production costs from $400 to $250. How much did scrapping the OtherOS hypervisor support contributed to these costs savings?

Taking the goal of Kaz Hirai of selling roughly 16 million units (1.5e8 in 9 years), increasing the costs by 10 cents per unit will give you a yearly budget of 1.6 Mega-bucks. So, I'd wager the guess, it was well less then 5 cents per unit.

I have a CECHE01 PS3 with a Linux install on it, I updated to 3.00 without worrying about losing my ability to boot or install a newer Linux distro. The options are still there and they work, just like I still have the ability to virtual PS2 memory cards and play PS2 games even though PS3's newer than my model can't do that.

But it's DRM that has been completely inoffensive and pain-free. That's the difference. I don't have a problem with copy protection. I wouldn't mind nailed down DRM on my pc, if it simply stopped games from being copied. The problem with DRM on the pc is that it goes further than that... it tracks you, it breaks things, it modifies your setup, it takes away legitimate functionality, it hinders free development... It ends up being the Sony rootkit, which should have put some Sony execs in jail.

If DRM meant that I always had to put the Starcraft 2 dvd in my computer when I wanted to play it, and NO OTHER RESTRICTION, I might actually buy the game. Instead, DRM seems to mean 'contact Blizzard every game for permission to play. Here's my IP, battlenet ID, etc., etc...'.

Exactly. The console experience (especially now-a-days) is beautiful... I really have no complaints about the user experience. I especially love those blue tooth controllers. Everything is standardized and you know it will just work.

Maybe PCs are catching up, and I just don't know it? But I don't feel compelled to have a PC hooked up to my TV just to play games... especially when the only input device I have is a keyboard/mouse...

Some Windows games have special support for Xbox 360 controllers, I believe mainly those that are also released for the Xbox 360. The controls automatically map and force feedback works in the same way as it does on the Xbox - you just have to load the game. Of course, you need a special adapter to use an Xbox 360 wireless controller on a PC, as these do not use Bluetooth.

I've seen Fallout 3 on a PC and on the Xbox 360. The PC was a unremarkable Core 2 Duo system with a Radeon HD 4670 (which cost $90 bac

On a console? Is that like when PC games are released early in the alpha stage and the first 3 months are so are devoted to patching the game into a somewhat-workable state? And a broken console can't stop me from doing work (at least not directly, heh heh) but a broken PC means not only can I not play games, I probably can't work either.

Never owned an X-Box I see. I don't own an X-Box either but against my advice my brother-in-law did and he has had nothing but trouble with it. He had it in and out of service for 5 months, this is his fourth X-Box in less than 2 years (warranty) and now it's eating his disks. The disks are not under warranty. Too bad he can't make a backup copy of them.

My rerfigerator is a a computer. My thermostat is a computer. My car's engine has a computer. My remote control is a computer. I don't get persnickety about not being able to Linux on those devices. Why should I, or anyone else, get upset that I can't put Linux on a console? The other poster is right. If you want to install Linux and use it buy a device that lets you easily install and run arbitrary code. You'll never achieve the mythical "year Linux takes over the desktop" if you keep wasting time trying to put it on everything *BUT* desktop computers.

all you are saying is that proprietary restrictions work both ways, which is exactly one of the issues brought up by FOSS promoters about proprietary software. The Commodore, Amiga, Atari, and others of their time were "computers" or "consoles" based on what was desired by the USER. Today, users PAY console / SDK developers to provide "protections" against open third party development to provide an incentive of non-competition to large gaming companies by ensuring that the only games / software is going to

That's not such a big deal for most of the games in it (excepting performance problems), but Team Fortress 2 has had continuing updates on the PC platform (and the Xbox 360 version has even had a few bugfix patches).

But there are a lot of games that the PS3 can't play because the game's developer isn't a big enough company. If a platform is supposed to act as an incubator for game studios, it needs either A. the ability to act as a computer or B. something like the XNA Creators Club. The original PS3 had A (to an extent), the Xbox 360 and iPhone have B, and the Wii and slim PS3 have neither.

Buy a damned computer, or one of the mobiles you can install Linux on.

Maybe you should RTFA before posting...

Of course there are a million machines you can install Linux on, but the PS3 was particularly nice because of its Cell architecture. That allowed for some super-computer like performance for a low, low price. Lots of research institutions used PS3 clusters for low cost supercomputing. Now that future is jeopardized.

But how many these "million machines" are designed to connect to a standard-definition television? I looked at Best Buy a couple weeks ago and saw a bunch of PCs with VGA and possibly DVI or HDMI outputs but no S-Video. Or by "million machines", are you referring to any original PS3 units that might show up on the second-hand market?

Yes, LInux on the PS3 runs under a hypervisor, but your information is quite incorrect. You have full access to the dual threaded PPC core (with Altivec) and it runs at the full 3.2 GHz speed. You also have full access to 6 SPE's. What you don't have is full access to the RSX, only framebuffer, but that's okay if you only want to do serious number crunching as a researcher. They use off the shelf PS3 hardware.

Of course there are a million machines you can install Linux on, but the PS3 was particularly nice because of its Cell architecture. That allowed for some super-computer like performance for a low, low price. Lots of research institutions used PS3 clusters for low cost supercomputing. Now that future is jeopardized.

Lots? More like "barely any." The only entity that has done anything significant is IBM with their Roadrunner supercomputer [wikipedia.org]. A network of several PS3s is not a supercomputer.

Nobody uses the PS3 for supercomputing these days. The ugly secret of the PS3 is that its 'extreme performance' was mostly marketing. While it was fairly fast at release, it is ridiculously complex to code for. You're talking about a machine with 9 distinct memory spaces, 4 instruction sets and 3 compilers. And while Sony may market it as having '2 teraflops' of performance, it only has about 450gflops of total programmable computation power. The vaunted Cell processor only clocks in at around 250GFlops, which you get pretty easily with Core i7 (Nehalem)... and it's a LOT easier to get peak performance out of the Core i7. Let me repeat that for emphasis it is mindbogglingly simpler to get peak performance out of the Core i7. And if you're willing to spend more a little time and money to code to a specialized platform, GPU computing with CUDA (and OpenCL once it matures) spanks the Cell. You can buy multi-GPU machines from NVidia that are pushing 4 teraflops programmable.

Ultimately though, the biggest killer of the PS3 in supercomputing is all that power is single precision, and single precision only. You can get away with single precision SOMETIMES in scientific computing, but more often than not it's a deal breaker. Even when you can use single precision, it's often in a mixed precision context. The PS3 has no double precision support, and that kills it.

Nobody uses the PS3 for supercomputing these days. The ugly secret of the PS3 is that its 'extreme performance' was mostly marketing.

Folding@Home maintains a popular PS3 client that is currently used by 31,933 PS3s. [stanford.edu] The PS3s provide about 26% of the total x86 equivalent TFLOPS available to F@H, although PS3s represent just 9% of the total F@H CPU population.

That's another box to buy and connect to the TV. I thought people chose the PLAYSTATION 3 to get away from having to buy an extra box for everything.

Yes, that's why there's PS2 compatibility. Oh wait, there isn't so now I have to connect my PS2 to play PS2 games. Besides, how many people use their PS3 as the main computer anyway? I'd rather get a Dell computer that comes with more than 256 MB of RAM for my $400 thank you very much.

If you have an SDTV, you have to buy yet another box to convert the VGA signals from the PC to the composite or S-Video signals that the console understands.

And if you have your PS3 connected to an SDTV, you're wasting the entire purpose of the PS3: playing Blu-Ray and playing games in high definition.

You should care if you want to develop for the cell processor or want to build a cheap and powerful cluster. Currently there is no other stand alone Cell powered computer available besides the PS3. IBM only offers two different Cell processor blade servers which would cost well over ten thousand dollars. The PS3 is the only "personal computer" that is cell powered. Even if some company came along and started to offer a Cell powered PC the price will be many times that of the PS3.

RTFA. Sony has chosen not to maintain the Hypervisor for the new hardware. You can still run linux on the old systems, and they do not plan to disable that feature. This isn't open source hate, it's a practical business decision by a company that loses money every time they sell a console. They made the console cheaper.

And stopped people from buying it that weren't going to buy games and accessories with it.

Yes, some gamers also installed Linux, but there were -many- people who bought it just to install Linux, for various reasons. Each of those sales was an absolute loss for Sony and it doesn't make sense to encourage it.

I don't blame them one bit. Besides, I installed linux and it wasn't a very good experience on the PS3, between horrible installs and slowness and general awkwardness like having to choose what to load on reboot/etc. I ended up just putting a PC in the room instead.

Besides, I installed linux and it wasn't a very good experience on the PS3, between horrible installs and slowness and general awkwardness like having to choose what to load on reboot/etc. I ended up just putting a PC in the room instead.

Exactly. I don't understand this whole "lets stuff Ubuntu on a computer designed for gaming" nonsense. I mean, it has 256 MB RAM, no graphics card for Linux to take advantage of...what's the point?

The hypervisor gave homebrew developers a way to make apps without enabling warez. But now the homebrew community and the warez community are brought back together by the need to find a hack to access the console resources. And once one finds a way in, the other gets it for free, no stopping them.

Linux support seemed like an intelligent way to take a stab at piracy on the cheap, while paying lip-service to Open Source, etc, and getting a tiny amount of street-cred for it. It may be that's not worth th

I agree, anyone who wanted to run Linux on a PS3 probably already has one. The slim model is not aimed at Sony's hardcore fanbase (who probably wanted backwards compatibility and already have a PS3) or open source geeks, but those who don't have one already.

Sony said something similar when they released the slim PS2 without the hard drive bay: "Look, most likely anyone who wanted to play the few hard drive enabled games already has a fat PS2 because they're hardcore fans"

Comparing the cost of driver updates on a per console basis doesn't make much sense. There is a one time cost to create the drivers plus maybe the salary of one programmer to maintain the drivers. Per console, that's miniscule.

And honestly, for the great majority of users, why on earth would you bother putting Linux on a PS3 (aside from 'because I can' and scientific stuff, for which there are better solutions and more interesting challenges), except to pirate games?

I'm having a really hard time finding out why I'm supposed to be as outraged as the tone of this suggests I should be.

As mentioned in other comments, PS3's architecture was great. It offered really strong computing at a really low cost. Lots of people used multiple PS3's running Linux to do a wide variety of tasks, from server farms to rendering to whatever.

Now, You are right, for a great majority of the users, they DON'T put linux on their PS3. So when they decided to lower the price, they had to drop a feature. Guess which one got dropped? Right, support for other OS's.

Sony didn't make it a challenge. I thought that so at first, but guess what? It was the hypervisor restricting all the access. Hypervisor's gone, all that's left is to hack the firmware to allow installing another OS. If anything, Sony's likely made it easier to get Linux running.

Yeah, well that wasn't a capability of many big PS3s either, the 40GB in Europe never had that capability. Sad, yes, but once the PS3 game library was big enough an understandable cost optimisation.

Maybe Sony will one day sort out its PS2 software emulation (not the half and half that they had in 2nd generation PS3s in some markets) so that we can load our existing games (although I suspect they would rather we rebought them in the PS Store).

I think this is a more practical thing to be concerned about, at least for some of us. I thought about buying a PS3, even though it's unlikely I'd buy many games at first, because looking forward it seemed to make sense. But heck, my daughter still plays a number of PS2 games on a regular basis - so nope, we're not getting a PS3 for a while.

I don't understand why console makers can't grasp that we don't want to keep connecting more and more devices concurrently to our televisions, or having said devices ta

Creator's Club is simply nothing like the OtherOS support Sony had. One is for developing XNA framework games and selling them on Xbox Live, the other is for turning your PS3 into a slightly gimped Linux box (gimped as in no direct access to GPU). They're targeted at completely different people and don't even serve remotely the same purpose.

I looked it up on Google, and based on what I read on Kotaku, it isn't much different from WiiWare or DSiWare. I didn't see anything about how developers can sign up, unlike XNA where anyone with a 360 and a recent Windows PC with non-Intel graphics can get started.

Sure, as a consumer you may have an interest in whatever suits you, but that interest is not in relation to your being a member of the "open source world". Any interaction you have with Whoppers and Whopper-related products are completely independent of your status as a member of the "open source world".

Of course, the fact that ingredients and recipes for hamburgers are widely available, and I can make my own burgers at home with tools available to the public might make Hamburgers somewhat open-source. I

But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux on its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony.

Unless they -- I don't know -- like playing console games, like the vast majority of people who buy game consoles. My microwave oven doesn't run Linux, either, but it somehow manages to still be useful to me.

Honestly, I think out-of-touch rants like this only serve to further reinforce the "Linux zealot" stereotype, and drive the mainstream away from Linux.

My microwave oven doesn't run Linux, either, but it somehow manages to still be useful to me.

*whistles innocently*

Don't be too sure about that. I've worked on embedded systems on consumer devices, and you'd be amazed at what runs Linux these days. Hardware manufacturers really like NOT paying license fees & royalties for their embedded firmware.

So yes, they've changed their strategy to boost sales of the new PS3 by selling at a loss and intending to make up the money on game sales. How many people will buy several of these and never play games on them? Probably not too many, but where do you draw the line?

The problem is that PS3's are cheaper sources of Cell processors than anything IBM is selling. If you want to set up (at a university say) a research cluster of 4 or 8 Cell based computers for astrophysics, datamining, or the like, it was cheaper to buy PS3's than even consider the IBM bought Cell based servers. But then you weren't buying games, and Sony wasn't getting financial credit for subsidizing academic research (if they donated the equipment it would be a tax write off likely but if you buy it they get nothing, and since they're selling at a loss they only want you to buy if you'll buy games too).

Also, as amusingly geeky as this was, how many of their gaming customers actually bothered? This was never an actual selling feature of the system, they were trying to circumvent EU import tariffs on game consoles that aren't on computers. The EU didn't buy it with the PS2, I doubt they bought it with the PS3.

No contest. I wasn't suggesting using a Cell cluster is a particularly good idea, but that's the point of academia, try things out, see what happens, see what you can learn.

While I'm more a GPU computing guy, some people at the last place I worked were tinkering with a small PS3 cluster. Their biggest problem was overall system memory rather than 256k cache per SPE. Not like nvidia's 16k/stream processor (8 processors to a block) in a great deal better. The whole challenge is really changing how you thi

They dropped the support because it was an rarely utilized feature and it was cheaper not to support it on the new model.

I run Linux on all my PCs (2 laptops and 4 desktops) but never installed it on my PS3 (despite having partitioned my upgraded hard drive with room for it). I never felt the need to do so. I run a media server on two of the Linux boxes and I don't need the PS3 to be a 7th general purpose computer when that is not it's intended function as one and not designed for that purpose.

This fanboy of Linux (and fanboy of Sony as well) doesn't care about the dropped support. I thank Sony for all the support up to this point and wish this platform continued success.

I used to work for Sony developing PS2 games. The number of people I met that cut their teeth writing code on the linux kit before getting into the business was exactly 0. I might have been the only person I knew who even had a modchipped PS2, everybody else just didn't care since they had the PS2Tool on their desk to do development. Sony is probably discontinuing offering Linux because it didn't spark the development push that they had hoped for.
Still, I would think this would limit the number of supercomputer clusters that use PS3's. You'd think the marketing benefits of being a platform in the top 100 supercomputers would be valuable, but perhaps Sony is still willing to work with academic institutions to make this possible still.

Let me preface this answer by revealing that I no longer work in the video game industry, as I did not enjoy it enough to stay.
A lot of people cut their teeth on writing Windows stuff for fun, maybe working on mods, but a fair amount of developers worked their way up from QA. At least where I worked, it seemed like there were way too many people wanting to get into the video games industry, and once they did get in, they worked their asses off. People would learn to code due to their love of games, not

If you mean PCs running Windows, then on which platforms did most developers cut their multiple-players-on-one-screen teeth? Or did most developers cut their teeth exclusively on game genres that fit well with a separate screen per player (e.g. FPS, RTS) as opposed to genres that put all players on one screen (e.g. fighting)?

Just summarize the article, don't whine to me about how you don't like Sony. I am able to evaluate actions they take individually. Rootkit = bad. PS3 not supporting linux = good business decision. They are in no way related to each other since this isn't replacing Linux on the PS3 with a rootkit.

And seriously wake up. If you get pissed at Sony for the dumb things they do, then you probably wouldn't buy a product from anyone if you actually paid attention to all the crap that has gone on in each company's history.

Didn't Yellow Dog Linux and its utilities limit the hardware the user could and couldn't access if he wanted to develop? I think that said something about Sony's commitment to basic user freedoms long before this happened.

All Sony has done is reverted to the status quo for game consoles. The Wii and 360 don't allow Linux to be run. While Sony should be praised for including a (mostly gimped) linux option with the PS3, they shouldn't be condemned any more than Nintendo or Microsoft for not including it. I'm not a Sony fan at all.

The censored message (noticed by pjmlp [playstation2-linux.com]) was a reply from Sarah to a question I made (Why no Linux in PS3 Slim? [playstation2-linux.com]). The answer -verbatim- it was recovered because of mail lists and by backups: at Slashdot (1 [slashdot.org]), and also in a "repost" in the same PS2-Linux Sony's forum (2 [playstation2-linux.com], 3 [playstation2-linux.com]).

I've found very disgusting the fact of removing the Other OS option in the PS3 Slim model, and the worst: without explanation. In previous cuts, as it was with the PS2 compatibility it was explained that was in order to cut price, removing PS2 CPU chip first, and PS2 graphic and memory subsistem second, which I found acceptable as explanation.

Why? Is being used unencrypted RAM access or similar? Or is just a plain rip-off?

I know that there are many kind people at Sony Computer Entertainment, so please, if possible, give at least a short explanation of why it has been discontinued the Other OS option in the new PS3s.

Thank you in advance,

aragon

P.S. PS2 Linux user since 2002, and since 2007 for the PS3.
P.S.2. I still can not believe it, what a disgrace.

I'm sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding
the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim.

The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many
changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS
install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers
for any significant hardware changes - this costs SCE. One of our key objectives
with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail
price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with
the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.

We'll see if we can get the offical OtherOS page updated with something to this
effect so that an official explanation is provided. Thank you for your comments.

could will be possible for SCE to develop and sell a 'PS3-Slim OtherOS license'?.
since there is a few wannabe/homebrew projects running in PS3 hardware (the
cheapest IBM-cell developer machine), and these projects are dumped to dust
with this major revision of PS3-architectur

Dear fuckwad, please learn what censorship actually is and stop calling everything you don't like censorship in an attempt to gain notice, you are just lowering the value of the word and making it so more and more people don't give a fuck when you scream censorship.

Please also learn that it is completely acceptable to every normal person on the planet to censor certain things at certain times, regardless your inability to understand that, or the fact that the world doesn't revolve around you.

In the future Sony will refrain from supporting Linux in anything initially, because they get more flack for not supporting it in all models than do other console makers for never having supported it to begin with.

It's this kind of mean-spirited crap that keeps Open Source as generally a second-class citizen on platforms.

This shouldn't be surprising though. And you are right, the Dreamcast booting ordinary CDs was a far bigger deal. It is probably the major reason it failed as a console since it allowed very easy piracy.

With the exception of Nintendo, consoles are sold at a loss. If you are using it for non-gaming purposes, then you are causing Sony to lose money. So people buying PS3 to make cheap clusters are a detriment. This is simply a business decision that makes sense. They were hoping that Slashdot types woul